Beliefs About Moral Obligation Structure Children’s Social Category-Based Expectations

• In Event: 1-034 - How Do Social Groups Guide Children’s Sociomoral Reasoning?

Integrative Statement

Young children view people as holding intrinsic, moral obligations toward ingroup members, but do not view these obligations as extending across social category boundaries (Rhodes & Chalik, 2013). This belief shapes their expectations of how people act toward one another, facilitating predictions that people will act negatively toward outgroup members and positively toward ingroup members (Chalik & Rhodes, in press; Rhodes, 2012). Yet, children do not use social categories to predict all social behaviors, suggesting that they do not view all behaviors as relevant to their abstract expectations of how social category members are supposed to interact with one another. The present work investigates how children specify which behaviors are and are not constrained by social category membership.
In Study 1 (N = 64), 4- and 5-year-old children were introduced to a novel behavior that varied in whether it was positive or negative (valence), and whether it was prescribed by moral or nonmoral rules (moral status). To manipulate moral status, we relied on a feature of moral thought that has been well-documented in research on the development of moral cognition (Nucci, 1981; Turiel, 1983; Killen & Smetana, 2015; Smetana, 2006): authority-independence. To that end, moral behaviors were described as remaining consistent regardless of what authority figures say, and nonmoral behaviors were described as dependent on whatever authority figures say. After introducing children to this behavior, we introduced them to two novel groups, and asked them to predict whether individuals from those groups would direct the novel behavior toward ingroup or outgroup members. For behaviors described as moral, children reliably predicted that positive actions would occur among fellow group members, and that negative actions would occur between members of different groups, whereas for behaviors described as nonmoral, children did not differ from chance in their predictions of positive or negative actions (valence*moral status interaction, χ2(1) = 15.93, p < .001, OR = 5.86; see Figure 1). These findings suggest that children’s expectations of intergroup behavior are shaped by abstract notions of whether behaviors are morally obligated or not, and not by information about valence.
In Study 2 (N = 64), we replicated results from Study 1 using a new definition of morality: consistency across multiple locations. Here, moral behaviors were described as consistent across two different locations, and nonmoral behaviors were described as differing based on location. Again, children held stronger expectations for behaviors that had been described as moral versus behaviors that had been described as nonmoral (valence*moral status interaction, χ2(1) = 5.36, p = .021, OR = 2.70; see Figure 2). These findings, again, suggest that beliefs about moral obligation drive children’s expectations of social category-based behavior, above and beyond information about the valence of those behaviors. Thus, notions of morality are embedded within children’s representations of social categories, such that when learning about novel moral norms, children immediately expect those obligations to uniquely hold within social groups.

Authors

• Lisa Chalik, Yeshiva University
  Presenting Author

• Yarrow Dunham, Yale
  Non-Presenting Author